A new habit every month

Around one year ago I read the book “The power of habit” from Charles Duhigg and since that moment I decided I would work to create a new habit every month.

Working only in one habit per month might seem not very ambitious, however, when you think about it at the end of the year I have 12 new habits. Each habit I see it as a tool, this means I have now 12 new tools in my tool box! That’s quite a lot!!

Habits that I introduced are quite varied from something so trivial as ensuring I brush my teeth twice per day, being every week day at 7:30am at the gym or create a routine to go to sleep (no smartphone in the bed was really difficult to achieve for me)

The good thing with the habits is that you do them without thinking about it, this is great as you don’t lose energy. I remember at the beginning how difficult was for me to wake up 7am and go to the gym... always procrastinating. It’s said to build a habit you need to repeat it at least during 21 days until you interiorize it. This particular one took me longer. However now it’s totally integrated in my morning routing, and I love it! 

Today I want to share with you the latest 2 habits I built.

·      New habit 1

o   Minimize the physical books I read and get more e-books. One of the main reasons why I read traditional book it’s because I like taking notes, use highlighters and grab ideas. However finally I found a way to do this with my Kindle. I knew how to highlight and add notes in my e-books. But I did not know what to do with those segments with notes. Not anymore! I learned how to transfer all my notes to my second brain (Evernote). I love using Evernote, it’s a very handy app that I use every day for numerous actions. I thought that it might be a good idea if I could find a way to transfer my notes of the e-book I read to my Evernote app. I didn’t know this was possible but finally I managed to do it! The key is in your Kindle book account! Yes, there’s a Kindle account, I didn’t know that, I thought I just have my Amazon account, but no, there’s also a Kindle account and all your notes, highlights, books and basically every task related with your reading activity is stored there. You just need to login https://kindle.amazon.com

and you will access to your notes/books. Once you are in that page all you have to do is right click and select the option “save full page to evernote” Once this is done your comments are stored in Evernote and they are very easy to tag/search.

·      New habit 2

o   It seems the whole human race is fighting against unproductive meetings and unproductive emails. At least in the IT companies I worked during my last 2 decades this was a common complaint..... long meetings (often not useful) and too many emails. Last month I started an experiment. What would happen if I do emails twice per day? What would happen if a work offline in my Outlook client? What would happen if I turn off push up notifications in my iPhone? You know what happened? Nothing! The world is not expecting that I reply an email 5 minutes after I received it. Sometimes we create this fake illusion that we need to reply emails ASAP. However this is not productive. Being focus in email in real time is a productivity killer. Now what I do is that I check/reply my email for an hour before lunch and another hour before going home. And just before going home I prepare the list of the tasks that I want to do when I arrive to the office. This works for me, I arrive to

 my desk and I start working in productive stuff, not in emails. Of course we need to read emails and answer emails, but during this month of my experiment I have not noticed that someone is upset because I don’t reply immediately. 99% of the emails can wait to be answered in my email window, either before lunch or before going home. And the rest of the day I have a bunch of hours to work on important tasks!

Today is already June. This means I have started to build a new habit, stay tuned to know if I’m able to create it J

Have fun!

@yolocalizo